Over at Lileks.com, my close personal friend* James Lileks was complaining about paint today. He’s repainting his office, and can’t seem to get the color he wants, once it actually dries. I have no comment on that subject. I moved into a pink office in the library several years ago, and have just lived with it because getting it repainted would be a lot of work.

What caught my attention was that, by my count, he used the word “gray” twice, but he spelled it “grey” both times.

I’ve seen this spelling come up more and more frequently lately, and it amuses me. All my life (which is another way of saying “from time immemorial”) I was taught that “gray” is the American spelling and “grey” is how the English do it. But “grey” seems to be winning out now. I suppose that’s because of the Fifty Shades of Grey books.

This may surprise you, but I’m not actually unhappy about this development. I’ve always thought spelling “grey” with an “e” was kind of cool. There’s something a tad bleaker, colder about that spelling. Grayer, you might say. Or greyer.

I remember reading an interview, probably in Writer’s Digest, with Colleen McCullough quite a few years ago. She was the author of The Thorn Birds, which was a big deal at the time. She mentioned that she always spelled gray with an “a,” except when describing people’s eyes. Gray eyes, she felt, should be spelled with an “e.”

I sympathized, though I’ve always used the “a” spelling myself. I have enough affectations already, without adopting English spellings.

But maybe “grey” will win.

I can live with it, in my grey old age.

*Editor’s Note: This is a lie.

Not much to tell you tonight. I have company, and it’s rude to blog while someone is conversing with you. Or so they tell me.

Our friend Dale Nelson sent me a recording of a 1964 interview with J. R. R. Tolkien, from (I assume) the BBC. I listened to it today. An interesting aspect is that he was a very rapid speaker — one of those people who seems to be thinking so fast his mouth can’t keep up with him. Not actually what you expect from a language scholar.

Another famous woman died today – Annette Funicello, famous as an early Mousketeer, and as the star of a string of 1960s beach movies.

I remember her well. I wasn’t one of those who had a crush on her, since her wave crested before I hit adolescence, but I was well aware of her. After working many years with Disney, she got cast with Frankie Avalon in a string of silly beach blanket movies. She also had a successful career as a singer.

Through all her career she was never – so far as I’ve been able to tell – involved in a scandal. The bikini movies were a little risque by the standards of the day, but she never did anything that crossed the line. Her image remained wholesome, and in time she faced the terrible disease that killed her with all the courage and grace you could ask of a human being.

The question occurred to me today – what would have happened to her if she’d been born later, and had come to fame in our own time?

That’s not a hard question to answer. She did appear again, in a sense, in the person of Britney Spears. And Lindsey Lohan. And Miley Cyrus.

Why was Annette able to live a life of dignity, while these younger women, born with the “advantage” of a culture that claims to promote the dignity and rights of women, have quickly made public jokes (and dirty ones) of themselves?

Not to say the younger girls didn’t have lots of “help.” Hollywood is certainly a field well-strewn with pitfalls. Money and fame at an early age are dangerous drugs in themselves, even before you get to the pills and powder.

But Hollywood was no convent school in the 1950s, either. Anybody who worked there in those days will tell you the predators were out in force, and there were ample opportunities for partying.

Annette, I think, benefited from Puritanism. She benefited from a double standard. She benefited from repression, and hypocrisy, and all those awful social constraints we despise the Fifties for today.

A girl in Annette’s position, if she wanted to be a “good girl,” actually had social resources available to her. America was in her corner, back then.

Nowadays, America’s peering through a hole in the Women’s Room wall, with an iPhone camera.

It’s called Progress.

You’re probably already aware that Lady Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, passed away today at the age of 87.

I think most American conservatives would be surprised to learn how hated this woman remains in her own country. On the basis of my own sampling of English culture, Mrs. Thatcher is commonly portrayed as a human ogress who closed factories, destroyed jobs, and snatched bread from the mouths of the hungry out of sheer hatred for the poor and their noble Socialist protectors.

This, for me, is the lesson of her life – if you do right in our time, do not expect any thanks. If you get away with a mere public shaming, you’ll be lucky. These things call for the endurance of the saints.

Death, it seems, is all around. On Saturday I attended my boss’s funeral. It was, I think, the largest I ever attended. He was a man much loved by many, many people.

Sometimes I think God is taking the best of us out of the world now, so they won’t have to see the evil that is to come.

Kenyon High School, photo: LakesnWoods.com

They have begun tearing down my old high school in Kenyon, Minnesota, pictured above. Nobody needed a building that size in the town, and it was full of asbestos, I understand.

I’m less sad about this than I was when I first heard the idea broached. As I think back, I realize that I don’t actually have a lot of good memories of the place. Although it’s sad that future tour guides will not be able to show pilgrims on Lars Walker heritage tours the place where the author studied and skipped the prom.

I wonder if there’s a cosmic maximum number of alma maters I’m allowed to have. I cheated by going to three different colleges, so now that I’ve signed up for graduate school one of the previous ones has to go.

Tim Keller remembers what Elizabeth Elliot told him about art.

One of the reasons I oppose same-sex marriage…

For years, churches have been nudging men out of the ministry by making the pastorate a “woman’s thing.”

For years, universities have been nudging men out of higher education by making a college education a “woman’s thing.”

More recently, society has begun nudging men out of marriage by (among other methods) making it a “gay” thing.

This is not surprising in a society that increasingly finds heterosexual males a frightening nuisance.

We’ve been talking about Vikings a lot this week, and in the background, I have looked a bit for sword fighting videos. Here’s a new one, showing viking-style swordsmen talking technique.

If only the TV series could have been authentic, like this.



I’m going to grouse about the History Channel Vikings series one more time. Because it’s still on my mind. I’m still working on my piece about it for the American Spectator, too, which helps explain my obsession.

The responses I’ve gotten on Facebook have been interesting. Some people have been as negative as I am, or more – which may have had the effect of egging me on. Others have said, “Hey, it’s an interesting story, well acted, and it may interest people in the Vikings, so count your blessings.”

I think my reaction is partly self-centered. What I’m really thinking, deep in my lizard brain, is “I’ve been toiling most of my life accumulating sufficient information on the Viking Age to enable me to write believable novels – and I still get stuff wrong sometimes. So how come these Hollywood punks get to scribble a couple of facts on sticky notes and insert them into an otherwise fantasy script, call it a story about Vikings, and get paid enough money for me to retire on?”

I suspect that what these people really want to do is “A Game of Thrones.” And they can’t tell the difference.

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